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Philosophy & Deep Thoughts On Tag/Category URLs

First off, my many thanks to this community for all of your past help and perspective. This is by far the most valuable SEO community on the web, and it is precisely because of all of you being here. Thanks!

I've recently kicked off a robust niche biotech news publishing site for a client, and in the first 6 weeks, we've generated 15K+ views and 9300 visits. The site is built on the WordPress platform.

I'm well aware that a best practice is to noindex tag and category pages, as I've heard SEOs say that they potentially lead to duplicate content issues. We're using tags and categories heavily, and to date, we've had just 282 visits from tag & category pages. So, that's 2.89% of our traffic; the vast majority of traffic has landed on the homepage or article pages (we are using author markup).

Here's my question, though, and it's more philosophical: do these pages really cause a duplicate content issue? Isn't Google able to determine that said page is a tag page, and thus not worthy of duplicate content penalties? If not, then why not?

To me, tag/category pages are sometimes better content pages to have ranked than article pages, since, for news especially, they potentially give searchers a better search result (particularly for short tail keywords). For example, if I write articles all the time about the Mayo Clinic," I'd rather have my evergreen "Mayo Clinic" tag page rank on page one for the keyword "mayo clinic" than just one specific article that very quickly drops out of the news cycle. Know what I mean?

So, to summarize:

1. Are doindexed tag/category pages really a duplicate content problem, and if so, why the heck?

2. Is there a strategy for ranking tag/category pages for news publishing sites ahead of article pages?

2 Responses

1. Are indexed tag/category pages really a duplicate content problem, and if so, why the heck?

Since we are getting philosophical - let's define "what is duplicate content"? in the first place. There's two different types really;

technical duplicate content - this is the kind we're referring to here. It's not real duplicate content (like you're trying to copy the same article or something over and over, it's not even cross domain). Technical duplicate content is there as a result of a function of the CMS or web development. Like tracking parameters, non-canonical homepages (www, non-www, /index.heml all loading etc), sorting functions on ecommerce sites.

actual duplicate content - this is more like when someone has scraped an article from one domain to another, or copied an article on purpose - to actually try and pass it off as "unique" when it's totally copied.

Tags & categories sort of cause "technical duplicate content" but not always. It depends how you have WordPress set up. Most commonly, I see them create duplicate content in the sense that a tag archive might look almost exactly the same as the article page its self - or very similar.

OR what a lot of people are referring to and don't even realize it (which is a bit of a pet peeve) is the subpages off of tags and categories. When tag and/or category pages paginate (again, depending on how it's set up) the title tags will look like duplicates.

ie:

/tag/exercise-and-nutrition/ has the title tag: Exercise and Nutrition - Healthblog.com

/tag/exercise-and-nutrition/page/2 etc still has the title tag: Exercise and Nutrition - Healthblog.com

So the question really is - if tag/categories are "technical duplicate content" is THAT type of "duplicate content" an issue.

I've heard Google say: NO. John Mueller from Google has said multiple times in Webmaster Central Hangout Help Videos - "Google can distinguish this sort of accidental duplicate from real duplicate content".

BUT - not so fast - tags and categories can still be an issue, just NOT because of "duplicate content."

2. I do recommend indexation in categories by default in most cases. Not sure where you've also heard to noindex categories. That's IF they are used correctly per #1 above. If you use 5-8 well constructed and chosen categories there should not be a problem with indexing categories.

3. Noindex subpages of archives - this kills 95% of what some folks mistakingly call "duplicate content" and is really just duplicate title tags from the pagination of subpages.

index bloat - lots of pages getting indexed that fill up the index and distract from what you might prefer to rank for instead

poor user metrics from Google results - users tend to bounce off of tag archives, creatig lower user metrics, which can feed back into rankings

dilution of content - so while this isn't "duplicate content" is is content dilution: multiple pages that all sort of overlap in topics.

2. Is there a strategy for ranking tag/category pages for news publishing sites ahead of article pages?

Totally! Check out Kane's comment on my WordPress post - essentially he is saying to customize your category archives with some unique content on them, as to distinguish them from being posts. Also, only display excerpts of your posts on archive pages.

We always cite SugarRae's blog as a great example. Check out her category page here. It has totally unique content at the top, and the posts below.

- - -

To conclude, and keep it philosophical :)

I think what you're also getting at here, is an important part of SEO (or anything) that people don't talk about as much - but that's the idea of keeping an open mind, analyzing your specific situation, testing, testing the limits of "rules" - and really applying your own brain. Validate things for yourself.

One of the biggest issues, is that most people do not use tags in a deliberate way or really understand how they fully function. They just slap 20 tags on every post (which they think is a magic SEO trick) and end up with thousands of tag pages (I've seen sites with 7,000+ tag archives!) - at the beginning this might not be an issues, but over time if done recklessly like that, it can cause some of the problems noted above.

Well..., since you opened the Philosophy & Deep Thoughts topic, think of it like this: the answer to your question lies in the engagement strategy you develop for those pages. There is no rule here. How can you formulate those pages to effectively entice likes, shares, retweets, comments, +1's?--that's the question.

For the category pages, formulate and execute a strategy that will leverage the philosophy of your product mix/editorial calendar (the two should mesh). (You have formulated those two things based on business objectives and target audience, right?) There is a reason you sell the specific products that you sell, right?---make that a fundamentally obvious part of your category page content and provide an rss feed specific to the audience of that philosophy--even if it's a small target audience. Produce content for that feed on a regular basis.

If you structure the content of your category pages around a curation philosophy there will be a fundamental difference between those pages and the content on your product pages. At that point, your duplicate content will disappear.

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